Good afternoon. My name is Sally and I will be your conference operator today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the Talking Operations webinar. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star than the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. We will now welcome our host, Jessica Capuano from SAIC. You may begin your conference. Hello and welcome to a special talking -- Talking Operations. We know this is a very busy time for everyone read for the holidays. Thank you for your participation. This is the second part in a three-part course on traffic signal program management. Today's webinar is focused on organizational management for signal systems part A . My name is a Jessica Capuano and I will give a brief introduction to the Web conference environment before turning over to our instructor. Please be advised that our seminar is being recorded. Format of this webinar is a little different than previous talking -- Talking Operations webinar. Instead of several presentations we will have one instructor. I will also the more interactive. There will be several audience polls during the webinar in the instructor will pause a few times during the webinar to take questions both over the chat area and over the phone line. The webinar will only last approximate 60 minutes with question and answer sessions interspersed. During the webinar if you have a question you can type it into the smaller text box in the chat area on the left side of your screen. Please make sure that you send the question to everyone rather than just the presenter. In the instructor will stop at certain points during the webinar to address the questions as well as to take questions from the phone line. The operator will provide instructions on how to ask the question over the phone line. A file containing the audio and visual portion of the seminar will be posted to the website within the next week. I will type that address into the box shortly. Attendees will be notified of the availability of the presentation, the recording and the closed captioning of the seminar. We encourage you to direct others in your office that were not able to attend this what not to access the recording online. The presentation used today is available for download in the download box on the left side of your screen. Download the file, click with your mouse on the name of the file and then click the button at the bottom of the download box that says save to my computer. At this time, I'd like to introduce our instructor for today's webinar. Mr. Lawrence Marcus has 25 years experience in traffic engineering planning and operations. He has extensive experience in local and regional government transportation, program and project management, and training facilitation. Mr. Marcus has been adjunct professor at Washington University for 15 years and is currently the vice chair of the ITE transportation planning executive Council. He oversaw traffic signal operations for the city of Rockville, and is now an associate vice president at HNTB. Feel free to start when you are ready. Thank you very much. Well, I guess welcome back, everyone. This is the second of a three-part series on management for traffic signal operators. In general terms. And just to be sure we're on the same page, and to warm me up a bit, if you could use the polling to respond to if you were part of this session that took place last week, if you could go ahead and pull that in real quick to get a feel for how many are new participants versus those that run last week? -- That were on last week? Just as people pull in, the learning objectives and the purpose of the first session really is to set the groundwork for us to help any way we can with those that have more of a technical background through traffic engineering and other obviously relevant educational backgrounds. As you have moved from a technical role of traffic engineering into a management role, to help broaden your perspective, help meet the challenges that you have in your environment. And so the learning outcomes that came from the first module from last week where, as you can see, understanding and defining your organization purpose within the government agency and community, understanding that not everyone is in government, but that is certainly the target of this webinar series, recognizing your current organization culture and incorporating responses based on your organization's purpose and need, identifying major stakeholders, which we discussed at length last time and are going to drill down more into techniques this time as to how to work with them and then understanding the need for mission statements, values, goals and objectives in your own organization, we touched on that a bit and there was a good question or two at the end about if we could provide more examples and so I'll do so at the end of this webinar. Keep moving forward here. Just hopefully the outcome of the last session was to add perspective beyond the technical duties as I outlined before, understanding roles and responsibilities both within your government structure, how you operate with other departments, your supervisors, elected officials, those internal stakeholders, versus the actual external stakeholders for the community that you serve. Improving success by understanding the sake -- stakeholder needs, internal and externally and then mapping a plan for success by definition of missions, values, goals and objectives which is really something we're going to get into the third and final webinar within this series on Thursday. And then improving your organization program management and your program management skills. Much of that last topic will be discussed today. You can see from the polling about half of you attended and the other half didn't. The last webinar, I'll be cognizant of that as I move forward. Quickly, the overview of what the sessions were, the last one, technically was called defining organizational mission, values, goals and objectives, which we covered and is available for those who have signed up but were unable to attend. And then we split this and talked to -- this series for organizational management of these two areas, the first of which I'll be covering today which is more organizational management program versus project management and then on Thursday, get more into helping you define goals, objectives, performance measures, both for your system that you are operating as well as your staff and how you operate on the program delivery side. Well, generally speaking for this module, what we hope to achieve with each of you is recognizing whether your organization is structured well to meet the needs of your stakeholders, the internal and external stakeholders. And structures really gets to how we can help you manage your program itself. Secondly, recognizing whether you're organizational structure effectively meets your goals and objectives, if you have that. Understand that a flexible program management custard Taylor -- custom tailored to your organization -- a long way of saying just helping you improve the performance of your organization and that it continues to improve over time. You know, before we kicked off into this first slide, if I could just pull the group just to see where we are -- I think what we found last time was about half of you is that there was a pretty good amount of people who have a management background versus when I was at the annual ITE conference, it was 2/50. 48 having a traffic engineering, engineering background and two or three that actually had management training, the percentage went up. If you could just pull in, help me as far as the level that I teach this next topic, does your organization have an effective program management system in place now for you? It is that you have implemented or that you inherited. So if you could go ahead and fill out that pool or move forward -- poll All right. You can see the results. We have as it moves up, a number of you that are in the not sure category, which is fine. While we're discussing this now. I would say looking at that, no it doesn't, means you probably do understand what it is and don't have it. Then there's the strong 38 to 40% that has it in place, and you can compare it to what we go through over the next half hour to 45 minutes to see where you rate and if opportunity arises, you can chime in as well on what you have found to be successful. Just at the highest level, what you should be looking for from an effective program management system for traffic operations and maybe even generally speaking, first things first, following up on the discussion from last time, effective to medication, we will get into that shortly, specific to traffic operations. Proactive project management and then for you to be setting the bar as far as how high do you set the bar for your staff to be successful? Which certainly reflects on you. As we jump into external communication, could you use the chat box and chime in what tools you use now to communicate with your external stakeholders? And I'll keep moving as you do that. Certainly the foundation of external communication is communicating early and often with your stakeholders. I think that's frankly somewhat of a change over time, where transparency seems to be much more accepted with the technology that we have now and the ability for people to find out what's going on as well as expect to understand what's going on and us being transparent, communicating early and often sets the nice groundwork of trust internally and externally but in this case, with your external stakeholders. Important and something we probably don't do enough of is marketing our successes, and the things that we do to improve the traffic operations of your jurisdiction that would likely go unnoticed, but are important and certainly help. The reason why my experience that it goes unnoticed is that phrase, that silence you hear out there is to my supervisor, the silence you hear out there is our success. The fact we are not getting complaints means that things are going pretty well. But the need to get more proactive in marketing your success for what you are doing, whether improving the performance of the system, you can see here on the slide, saving taxpayer dollars, and the safety aspect as well. And then regularly communicating connecting with your media outlets, which varies by the size of your jurisdiction. When we run through some of the test and see what we have here. For different methods. Certainly stakeholder meetings, which is critical, wonderful, public radio, yes, I don't know if that's the HAR system or something that you have through your jurisdiction itself, but all good. General media, local cable stations, excellent. And then some of the newer technologies such as tweaking, then the basic e-mail, websites, local newspapers, public information centers, outstanding. Yes, press releases to the public meetings with individual enjoys -- HOAs, direct phone and e-mail. Thanks for your patience as I read through this. Project status, reports on the city website, seems basic but that is incredibly important in fact something I'm going to touch on later, if you go to that level of detail and have that as part of your project management process, that's just wonderful. Fred from Seattle, the webpage, e-mail, tweaking, excellent. -- tweeting, And then we have ITS committee meeting. I'm wondering what's left after we go through all of these, this is a great list, press releases, Facebook, certainly, I was waiting for this one from Mark, the VMSs out there, to be able to get the word out. Very good. Well, I will tell you my experience with -- on the communications side of things has been -- all extremes if you will, sharing a few examples with you, with a city of about 50,000 people that many employees, so a lot of traffic activity based on the fact that it is within the Washington Metropolitan area around about the Beltway, as far as severe traffic congestion, some areas, et cetera. The city did have many of what you listed as far as local cable station, which for those of you who have access to it, I've found that they were always looking for storage -- stories. It was a great way for me to market to walk out on site and show different things or my staff doing those things. 90% project information, 10% hey, this is the kind of stuff we do every day. Just to reach out and it's very controllable, so as opposed to reacting to the press asking questions as proactive of involvement. The other end of the spectrum that I've worked on our -- are billion dollar plus projects in the construction phase, MOT, but now with the changing of federal revelation management plans, which as many of you are probably aware is a key component of a TMP is the communication outreach. And in my case, until recently, I was managing a $100 million TMP program in Northern Virginia for the state of Virginia. It included staff of communication outreach people and I'll show you their website in a little bit. But three levels of human communication, which I found to be very efficient -- one was new projects, one was hot lanes on the way and another being rail extension, both at the locations shown on this website, Tytran corner, right on the Beltway. One of the congested areas in the region and has both of these projects under construction. -- Tysons. Three areas of communication. First was hey, we have these new projects coming, there's going to be some pain but more capacity -- multimodal capacity when all is said and done. The second level of communication was through employer outreach, I guess I could say traditional station -- transportation demand outreach consensus and then finally as reference and one of the chats was through lane closure management, variable message signs, that whole system of getting the word out on lane closures. So I just threw up a few examples that I thought were good for outreach. The first one that is shown through Tytrans, shows that it is actually a business community organization that put this website together with the input from the County and the state, who met regularly, meets regularly with this group and are partnering as it says here, to improve transportation for businesses, employees, and residents of the Tysons corner area, as it changes from a suburban business area to an area with four subway stations. And you can see some of the resources that they have their. -- there. Looking at of the district of Columbia's website, they have project level safety improvement projects, this is small scale on their website, so just an announcement as was chatted earlier, and then shown in the bottom center is V-DOT's program that I mentioned earlier, large-scale, $5 billion worth of the -- construction. -- DDOT. This would kind of be the full-blown plan that not many people have the resource to do, but this gives a good example of the areas. If you can read that left column, it gets into the type of things that are offered from a communication outreach to work with stakeholders from the lane closures to what the projects are, you can see commuter solutions, which is the incentive TDM program. You can see the list of resources that are there. Even then when you get down to the actual operations of this, within that megaproject program, there are several stakeholder groups, working groups, as suggested through the audience here, some methods to get the word out. One example is at our Beltway, which carries about 200,000 people a day crossing I-66, which carries about 150,000 vehicles per day, there were ramps that need to be closed for the weekend, complete movements that were taken out and regular coordination groups were occurring but as these major closures would come in, we would work with the signal operators from the towns, the cities, the County, just from a stakeholder standpoint and DDOT as the chair of this group and who manages and owns and operates the majority of the streets, coordinating these closures and understanding what the TMP was doing to supported versus the MOT closures and the potential spillover traffic, where it would go into the other jurisdictions during what are your time and it was definitely -- it could have been a disaster but it went extremely well because of the proactive communications and no surprises, if you will. In the interest of time, keep moving. Getting back to what we discussed in the first session, internal communication, somewhat similar list, much different examples of how to communicate internally, to be successful with your program, first again communicating early and often and what I've found to be successful has been weekly progress reports, not monthly but weekly progress reports and then at the annual conference we had a good discussion on this with a similar audience and then saying I think less than 10/50 were communicating weekly. They were communicating monthly, but certainly getting together informally with their supervisors, city managers, county executives, et cetera communicating. But there wasn't the formal getting the word out as things are coming out between those monthly milestones, both on progress and what has changed, so you are not waiting a month to communicate that information. I think similarly internally, showing your value, marketing your successes which is certainly important, as you get into your CIP budget season as to the value of the projects that you have, and setting up a system which we could discuss later to benchmark what improvements and service and quality of performance you get from your different projects, and then proactively communicating with all involved and executing tasks, which we'll get into in a few minutes. Well, in going through this type of training and consulting, iceberg within a few examples to show what a jurisdiction for example has come across in staff interviews, and potential solutions that were put together, hopefully relevant to this topic, certainly the first is lack of communication with the staff observation at this jurisdiction and then working with the staff to look at ways to improve -- kind of quickly going through this, lack of internal communication across the departments, delayed project causing project to be behind schedule, and most of that was because there wasn't a proactive approach to saying hey, this is the work I'm going to need help with, here's the plan to review, here's where I need you to help me in the field because it was done with a short horizon in mind, it was hard to get staff available to help with what became crisis situations. Potential solutions certainly or expanding the project kickoff meeting, which I show as it a higher level summary later, the need to discuss with all participants who touch the project in doing it as well as in stakeholders and project controls, understand what areas of responsibility inside and outside your department you are going to need help from. Really pushing to ensure that all departments are present at the start of each of these project kickoff meetings and that you are protecting the interest of each of those departments, understanding what they are sensitive to. So you can address that early as opposed to potentially delaying your project later whether that is a parks and rec issue, environmental, right-of-way issue, that you identify those things early, increasing the frequency and improving the attendance of your team meetings, which is a wish, and it just depends on how important you make your project, and we're getting into prioritization later, but so often the CIP type projects or routine projects take a backseat to Council priorities, and slide. And unless you make it a priority, both within your staff and your organization, these type of project tend to slip. And I think we covered the kickoff meeting already. As we jump into proactive project management and I've touched on it a bit, give me your perspective, what are we dealing with here from across the nation? I saw even internationally with the participants. Are you in a proactive environment or a reactive environment? There will be a chat question for you to answer with that regard. Why don't we go ahead and pull as we move forward here? So again the question, does your organization have an effective program management? And specifically, does your organization manage it proactively? And just so everybody is aware, I typed that into the chat box, so if you could respond in the chat box, that would be wonderful. Well, without pushing on a topic I'm sure you've all heard in other forums, the seven habits of effective people, something that has stuck with me from that book is the different quadrants, the four quadrants and the level of urgency and importance of work. It just seems to hit so spot on with our traffic operations work in the four quadrants being important and urgent, meaning councilmember calls and you need to get something done for them or your supervisor calls with something important, second thing is the queue two, the important but not urgent, not important but urgent, and then not important not urgent. -- Q2, As a follow-up to the first poll, if you could pull in where you spend most of your time, and which of those four boxes OSHA I can repeat them as you're going through. The important now, the important not now, and then the infamous not important but urgent, and finally neither. Well, looking through the chat on how proactive your organization is it looks like we have a range of both, and I think the reality is oath is what we have to deal with on a daily basis. -- Both. The challenge is how we manage it. And looking through your results on where you are spending your time, I tell you what, I don't clear my inbox of the magazines very often either. The fourth quarter and, if you will. Third quadrant, not important, only 7%, that means you have other people doing that? And then a split between the first two. That's the best case scenario, right? That's where we should be spending our time. Traditionally what we have read in that book as well as experienced is the hardest thing is getting to Q2 of forecasting what's important and finding time to do it before it becomes urgent. That's good to see. And just a summary of the things that we'll be pushing here, driving with your high beams on meaning this Q2, wherever possible understanding what's coming and planning for it, understanding that our environment is not 100% that way. Whenever possible having your routine maintenance programs and done as preventive. And then understanding and forecasting project constraints and risks early. Well, we touched on kickoff meetings. I don't think we need to get into that again. And then how you manage your group more technically as far as from a project level or project staff upcoming milestones, all involved can execute them. Working with some of the project management tools that are out there that are available to help you do such a thing. Well, and it just kind of ensuring we're on the same page, the first one I preach early and often and hope you agree, empowering your front-line staff to be successful and growing. Those that are at three, four, five years and your assigning technical duties only are not learning the leadership, the management, and at five, six, seven come eight years the switch doesn't turn on for them to help. As importantly, they have tasks they are doing. Do they other and stand the -- understand the bigger picture? Scope, schedule, budget associated with the task? How much of their responsibility, accountability, do you push down to your front-line staff to take ownership and to be successful, which I think is the win-win? Win for you as they see the bigger project management and help the overall project manager be successful, but learning at baby steps to become a project manager by taking on larger and larger tasks. So that's really a culture thing that you have to consider as to how you work with your group. Quality control is critical, certainly in our field and I don't know that I have to say a lot about this, just because of the safety aspect of what we do and the financial responsibilities that we have with a government agency, it's just the quality control has to be priority one. And then finally, how you as a manager track and deliver projects within scope, schedule, budget. Frankly, within that range, how do you manage your day-to-day routine maintenance, routine CIP projects that don't get as much press because of the type of the work they are? Versus of the high exposure, high priority project, how you ensure that everything gets done at the end of the day. Well, just a few examples, I apologize says -- for the quality. The best that we can here, this shows a very simple three-week look ahead for tasks and just managing the tasks themselves, before we get into anything else, just an example of a project look ahead. This frankly was done in Excel, nothing fancy in this but another example. Second example, using Microsoft Project, it has to do with accountability for your resources, so you are ID'ing your resources to tasks or subtasks and how well they are doing as far as percent complete. And getting the work done. For those of you who have used the software, you can track anything from start date, duration, and date, you can track finances, which I think is okay in this software. But it is outstanding for resource allocation, outstanding for scope and schedule and high level budgets. Next example I pulled up to show something where maybe you front and your Primavera type level of detail of when you are pulling to what you would show your stakeholders. This case, I've used the same Microsoft Project scheduled to convey to either my supervisor or a public sector project manager, on the other stakeholders, how well you're doing on schedule, so people understand where your key milestones are, what percent complete the projects are, whether for the press release for your boss to understand to convey, and maybe most importantly, very simply, if you could see the column of scheduled with the -- with the icon, green is go, yellow keeping an eye on this because it's close, read we're in trouble, and this is why. -- red. The polite way to say it is beyond schedule. Just illustrative of things and tools I've found to be very helpful in project management. Now, with all of these tools said, one of the staff observations I've heard is hey, the environment I work in has all this stuff, and the problems we have are A, you need to teach people how to think this way more than just use these tools, and 2, as shown here in the staff observation, updating the project, you could have all the right tools in place but if they are not being used to manage as opposed to being used to report, they're not very helpful. There okay for reporting but the key to success is getting the group to follow your lead and how you are actually managing scope, schedule, budget. I'll kind of run through their specific items, managing -- managers tend to be were reluctant to update the status of their project, which contributes to a delay in the project or in the communication of the project, and tasks, because they haven't thought through the full process, tasks slip through the cracks. An example would be a CIP projects where you need to move a guy wire and you need to notify the electric company or another utility company to move something, which doesn't take hours or days, it takes weeks or months. If that isn't scheduled early to do, at the right time within your construction phasing, of your traffic project, you could call it project delays. Just as you can see here, some potential solutions really getting towards how you can use your system to be more beneficial from a program and a project perspective, the latter is creating a shared server for each item which shows all the project, pinch -- can help you from a project perspective. Including updated project status as one of the project controls and standards certainly just got to do -- if you are in the process of weekly reporting , getting information out to your internal or external stakeholders. As mentioned before, the website et cetera, the last thing you want is to have old information on your outreach platform. All right. We had discussed earlier too and told you as far as reactive versus proactive, understanding -- I have a graphic later that everything we do isn't possible to be proactive with based on the environment we're working in. But one of the staff observations was in general that they were too reactive to project management as it shows here, the environment was very reactive rather than proactive, and they felt of the causes word lack of medication, tracking, the organizational culture, and frankly, the workload that they just were overwhelmed in doing all of the Q1, Q2 boxes, if you will, everything that is urgent and not everything that's important. And then their solutions were similar to what we are discussing as far as creating a proactive approach to scheduling and management. Ensuring that your project managers are doing such, tracking active and approaching tasks, the key one being approaching as well, alerting task managers of upcoming work and ensuring administration managers to secure resources early for you . This really gets a bit into matrix management approach and it depends on the size of your department and your organization, but many of our projects, not our routine signal operations, but our improvements involve more than just our department normally, and thus are we talking to the supervisors or the staff that we need to help us be successful? So we have the matrix of department managers, you having oversight over a majority but not everyone. And those that are going to help you be successful, do you have their time reserved to help you be successful? And then the others, pretty straightforward as far as deadline enforcement, oh, just improving the efficiency of project process to allow for the delivery of projects on time and within budget and conveying that to the neighborhoods and communities. You know, given that last statement, do you feel that your program management -- do you feel like you're program management system that you have in place is good for you first, it was kind of thought about that, but how about towards your stakeholder needs? How have you oriented towards your stakeholder needs? Would you say it is, it isn't, or working on it? That will be the next polling question for you. As you look through both the polling and the comments, I find it very interesting to look through as far as oriented toward stakeholder needs, much of what we're talking about as kind of the reality of the work we do, you can see that there is about a quarter of you that have it, and then three quarters -- two thirds of you that are probably working on it, understanding that it either has pieces that are -- but want to get better but maybe didn't realize that it needs to be. Then going through the task themselves, there is some interesting comments about like the last one, desiring and planning -- be proactive but the reality has -- is the environment we're in, we have to be reactive as well so you do the best you can within the environment you're working in. I'll let you kind of read through them as I push through it. Good, as far as proactive on large projects, easier to do, but also not on the smaller projects. Yeah, as Martha says, because of the environment that we're in with traffic signal operations, it's mostly reactive. That's the challenge that we have, how can we set up a system to be as protectable as possible given the field that we've chosen? Well, as far as on the CIP side and responding to citizen complaints and often, it's because of the volume or speed in a neighborhood, I have an example of traffic review process, not to critique the staff but just to show one way to analyze it, to ensure that we have a tracking system in place to be responsive. And so this is one way to look at it, if you will. The second way is so the first was and chart oriented. The second is the exact same process but if you can read it, -- Gant chart, it shows the same process but from a process map perspective, that you are receiving a complaint, it comes into screening process, whether it qualifies or not, then from there, speeding or and access management -- excess measurement or volume issue, then the different steps that you take. So mapping these things out I think is very helpful to educate, to ensure consistency, and I'm sure you have a leakproof system as well as things come through. Certainly from a process map standpoint, that gets you two, are we doing things right? Going back to the Gant chart process, it assigns accountability, as far as who is responsible for doing each aspect as well as the timeframe that is reasonable for each. I'm sure each of you looking at your jurisdictions, some traffic Coleman challenges will be very small-scale -- calming, something you can turn around quickly and others may be as referenced, a larger project that you go through and get not a general from yours -- a general category you pull money from but you would have to have specifically earmarked and has and all -- a whole other process involves. In this case with traffic call nine, -- calming, shifting to another set of stakeholders, another neighborhood or is it something you're controlling?